Maria Kranidis
ENGL 864
Dr. Williamson
Four Paragraphs
#1 This paragraph explains how Corinne functions in the novel
When presented with Corinne’s abundant gifts of talent one wonders how long she can provide for her audience what they need and expect form her. There is a sense of a specific kind of giving that is transcended in the novel which is compromised or even sacrificed with the potential of not practicing some other parts of social activity in order to produce and create in an aesthetic creative space. Corinne’s lost potential in having a family and a home, are not conscious decisions by her. She tells him, “In Rome because of my age and talents, I have the freedom of a married woman” (Corrine 133). But her desire to love a man whose identity and personality she has fictionalized on her own becomes clear that is not sufficient for creative purposes. In fact, it reduces all ability to create because he cannot love like she does. (I will return to this idea at a different time). love for him seems to drain the ability to create art that would inspire more art; instead it sterilizes the well of thought and feeling and enthusiasm. Kant’s aesthetic idea of art that questions “utility and ethical goodness” almost situates de Stael’s idea of the artist as functioning in the realm of love as the source of truth. Corinne’s body without love, without art, becomes a sterile ground where inheritance of the art is her main concern. She inherits melancholy that belongs to the woman artist, who Stael says, “the feelings that disturb such beings are rarely understood; constantly condemned, they would believe themselves alone in the world, they would soon hate their own nature for isolating them in a passionate melancholy” (de Stael). Corinne, because of her “superiority of mind and sensitivity of heart suffers sorrows that come with that” (de Stael). She does not have an offspring to pass on the gift; therefore she tries to educate the passion to her niece.
2 I chose this paragraph because I include de Stael’s personal voice**
De Stael creates a space in her novel where the artist woman will provide for the world differently than the domestic woman whose creations are compromised by the dogmatic practices of society. The identity of the woman artist of divine existence filled with plentitude opportunity but knows that this has to come to an end. According to de Stael, the reason the woman artist is unhappy at the end is because “society would become important to them –and also more dangerous because no one could talk to them about anything but love…”(de Stael). But for Corinne love is not limited to the physical world only. She takes pleasure in beauty until art runs out of time and so the artist mourns the loss of the gift before she even considers her broken heart in connection to Oswald. The role of the widow becomes important in the novel because it reflects on a new final invention of the self. Corinne mourns her previous self. She then retreats to the private, isolated world of memory where nothing new can happen, where imagination becomes an echo, not a voice. “I miss what I was; that is all. I used to take pride in my talent” Corinne tells Oswald (Corinne 268). After she has been alone for awhile she says, “I felt my mind slipping away” (Corinne 269). Corinne’s artistic superior abilities are destined to become “much ado about nothing” because women’s intelligence is not meant to turn into power, like men’s is. At the end of Corinne’s life we see a woman who does not have the company of a woman; instead she has a man who wanted to marry her. De Stael says that “such a woman parades her peculiar existence among classes she does not belong to, which consider her as destined to exist one her own…what she deserves in fact, is pity” (de Stael).
3 I chose this paragraph because I like how Lootens finds Hemans’s brutality necessary**
Tricia Lootens, in her analysis of Hemans’s poetry says that, “These poems explore and eroticize feminine modes of what Lucas would call epic heroism: violent, revolutionary, disruptive-and, not incidentally, ambiguously related to patriarchal power” (Lootens). But this power might be for Hemans only one of the representations of national identity. Perhaps the complexities of national identity lie in the whole nation which is inclusive of the power of endurance by its women and children. In many of the poems we get the sense that war is senseless and contributes to “brutality is implicitly unveiled as senseless. Poems in which despair jostles with energetic expressions of straightforward militarism, of feminist sexual politics, and of pacifism raise the specters of feminine "internal enemies" who refuse either to continue fighting for "divine law" or to reconcile themselves to failure. Nineteenth-century women poets' grappling with issues of national identity has yet to be fully explored” (Lootens).
4- I chose this paragraph because I like its lack of criticism criticism J**
Many of the aesthetic ideologies found in the texts we read include the popularities of the time the texts were written but the most fascinating aspect is that the authors by presenting issues of creation and nationality and identity, they create as they complicate the multitude of ways one can read texts. All of the authors, even though, at different times and through different centers of inspiration, expose difficulties between a world determined to change by war and politics and a world that refuses to ignore many common human characteristics. The idea of the artist as a seer of specific kind of truth remains present even in our own culture. Women creators hold a platform on many
venues; home, country, and the heart.
ENGL 864
Dr. Williamson
Four Paragraphs
#1 This paragraph explains how Corinne functions in the novel
When presented with Corinne’s abundant gifts of talent one wonders how long she can provide for her audience what they need and expect form her. There is a sense of a specific kind of giving that is transcended in the novel which is compromised or even sacrificed with the potential of not practicing some other parts of social activity in order to produce and create in an aesthetic creative space. Corinne’s lost potential in having a family and a home, are not conscious decisions by her. She tells him, “In Rome because of my age and talents, I have the freedom of a married woman” (Corrine 133). But her desire to love a man whose identity and personality she has fictionalized on her own becomes clear that is not sufficient for creative purposes. In fact, it reduces all ability to create because he cannot love like she does. (I will return to this idea at a different time). love for him seems to drain the ability to create art that would inspire more art; instead it sterilizes the well of thought and feeling and enthusiasm. Kant’s aesthetic idea of art that questions “utility and ethical goodness” almost situates de Stael’s idea of the artist as functioning in the realm of love as the source of truth. Corinne’s body without love, without art, becomes a sterile ground where inheritance of the art is her main concern. She inherits melancholy that belongs to the woman artist, who Stael says, “the feelings that disturb such beings are rarely understood; constantly condemned, they would believe themselves alone in the world, they would soon hate their own nature for isolating them in a passionate melancholy” (de Stael). Corinne, because of her “superiority of mind and sensitivity of heart suffers sorrows that come with that” (de Stael). She does not have an offspring to pass on the gift; therefore she tries to educate the passion to her niece.
- 2 I chose this paragraph because I include de Stael’s personal voice**
De Stael creates a space in her novel where the artist woman will provide for the world differently than the domestic woman whose creations are compromised by the dogmatic practices of society. The identity of the woman artist of divine existence filled with plentitude opportunity but knows that this has to come to an end. According to de Stael, the reason the woman artist is unhappy at the end is because “society would become important to them –and also more dangerous because no one could talk to them about anything but love…”(de Stael). But for Corinne love is not limited to the physical world only. She takes pleasure in beauty until art runs out of time and so the artist mourns the loss of the gift before she even considers her broken heart in connection to Oswald. The role of the widow becomes important in the novel because it reflects on a new final invention of the self. Corinne mourns her previous self. She then retreats to the private, isolated world of memory where nothing new can happen, where imagination becomes an echo, not a voice. “I miss what I was; that is all. I used to take pride in my talent” Corinne tells Oswald (Corinne 268). After she has been alone for awhile she says, “I felt my mind slipping away” (Corinne 269). Corinne’s artistic superior abilities are destined to become “much ado about nothing” because women’s intelligence is not meant to turn into power, like men’s is. At the end of Corinne’s life we see a woman who does not have the company of a woman; instead she has a man who wanted to marry her. De Stael says that “such a woman parades her peculiar existence among classes she does not belong to, which consider her as destined to exist one her own…what she deserves in fact, is pity” (de Stael).- 3 I chose this paragraph because I like how Lootens finds Hemans’s brutality necessary**
Tricia Lootens, in her analysis of Hemans’s poetry says that, “These poems explore and eroticize feminine modes of what Lucas would call epic heroism: violent, revolutionary, disruptive-and, not incidentally, ambiguously related to patriarchal power” (Lootens). But this power might be for Hemans only one of the representations of national identity. Perhaps the complexities of national identity lie in the whole nation which is inclusive of the power of endurance by its women and children. In many of the poems we get the sense that war is senseless and contributes to “brutality is implicitly unveiled as senseless. Poems in which despair jostles with energetic expressions of straightforward militarism, of feminist sexual politics, and of pacifism raise the specters of feminine "internal enemies" who refuse either to continue fighting for "divine law" or to reconcile themselves to failure. Nineteenth-century women poets' grappling with issues of national identity has yet to be fully explored” (Lootens).- 4- I chose this paragraph because I like its lack of criticism criticism J**
Many of the aesthetic ideologies found in the texts we read include the popularities of the time the texts were written but the most fascinating aspect is that the authors by presenting issues of creation and nationality and identity, they create as they complicate the multitude of ways one can read texts. All of the authors, even though, at different times and through different centers of inspiration, expose difficulties between a world determined to change by war and politics and a world that refuses to ignore many common human characteristics. The idea of the artist as a seer of specific kind of truth remains present even in our own culture. Women creators hold a platform on manyvenues; home, country, and the heart.